Archive for October, 2017

After my blog article about churches moving from addition to multiplication (See October 5, 2017, article.), a pastor asked, “If your church isn’t growing, don’t you need to move to addition before moving on to multiplication?” Great question! The surprising answer is “No.” You see we’re not talking about numbers so much as a mindset.

An addition mindset is one that is focused on filling pews. In that case the focus is on attracting more people through marketing our ministries and making tactical changes, like adjusting our worship times and service style to best meet the needs of those looking for a church, i.e. consumers. A multiplication mindset is all about a church empowering, equipping, and sending its people into the community–being in relationship with those in need of God’s love and Good News. A church can be shrinking or plateaued and still change its focus to that of empowering, equipping and sending its people. Often in the Gospels Jesus is quoted as saying one gains one’s life by losing it. This holds true for churches too. It is through a generous giving heart that churches will begin to gain renewed joy, energy, and purpose.

The Indiana Conference has a dream of every one of its churches becoming a missional community, that is a church that sends, whose people go. Every church can be a missional church, but it will require a mindset shift from addition to multiplication.

Sometimes a church can send people out and still be stuck in an addition mindset. For example in the book, Shaped by God’s Heart, Milfred Minatrea, writes: “Releasing members to start new churches is addition. Releasing members to start church-planting churches results in movements.” You see it all comes down to one’s mindset. Is it focused on addition or multiplication? For the sake of the Kingdom, may it be multiplication!

How did a United Methodist church in a community of only 900 people develop a weekly mid-week worship service that has grown from only a dozen elementary students three years ago to over 40? The answer: worship, food, and intentional outreach!

LaFontaine UMC, pastored by Crystal Jacobson, took its Wednesday after-school ministry and added a 30-minute worship service opened to their parents and other adults, followed by a meal that they help prepare. As a result, people who have never been involved in the church’s Sunday morning service have become regular participants on Wednesdays.

As a way to grow the service’s attendance, Pastor Crystal launched a bring-a-friend competition and began keeping track of the number of people each child invited during the previous week. As a result, this past year the children have invited nearly 550! And, so far, 62 have attended.

Inviting friends is now normative. Pastor Crystal shared that one of the best inviters was confused as to why the pastor was so impressed at her number of invitations. “She didn’t know that [inviting friends] is not normal in most congregations.” Crystal went on to report, “Our winner was a 7 year-old boy who would do a blitz of invitations on Tuesday evenings through texting and messenger, along with inviting friends at school. He won with 55 invitations.”

In August the church celebrated 10 baptisms–7 adults, and 3 children. All but one regularly attend the Wednesday service. And the Wednesday night attenders have been joining the Sunday morning congregation in joint events such as vacation Bible school, a fall hayride, summer feeding program and more! And the bottom line is more formerly unreached folk in the community are being discipled and are regularly worshiping God! Praise God!

I’m a product of the church growth movement, but the church growth movement isn’t going to take the church where it needs to go in the future. We need to move from addition to multiplication–from adding to our numbers through attraction, to sending out our people to start new faith communities that in turn raise up new leaders that are sent out to start new faith communities. Moving from addition to multiplication is a necessary step if we are to experience the kind of movement The United Methodist Church experienced in the early 1800’s in Indiana.

Up till now, a prime metric that we’ve been taught to watch is the average number of people in our weekly worship services. Therefore, we’ve focused on marketing our churches and protecting and conserving our numbers. The last thing we’d want to do is send people out because our worship attendance metric would take a hit.

The Church Development team is convinced that we need to change our prime metric and begin measuring the number of people that we’re sending out to help start new faith communities. The reality is that fewer and fewer people in the U.S. are interested in coming to our churches. What if we embrace Jesus’ command to go? What if we take the church to them?

Last month, over 100 church pastors and leaders from the Indiana Conference gathered with Bishop Trimble and the Church Development team to consider this very idea. What would it take for us and our churches to move from an addition mindset to one of multiplication. We’re convinced that God is moving right now in our leaders and churches, placing on many of their hearts and minds the desire to multiply! If you’re such a person, or you attend such a church, know that the Church Development team is ready to partner with you.

— Ed Fenstermacher, Associate Director of Church Development

Leaders praying at the Bishop’s Multiplication Summit held September 7, 2017